Do Hard Things if You Want an Easy Life

”Nothing worth having comes easy.”

The other day my mom told me about a family member who had a flat tire on her bike. This relative doesn’t live an easy life.

She had a doctor’s appointment and when she pulled out her bike to go there, she discovered the flat. She doesn’t have a car. So she ended up walking to the doctor’s office. To make it worse, it also started to rain after a few minutes into her walk.

She barely made it. I thought, “Man, I’m lucky. I have an easy life.” But then I also thought, “I did a lot of hard things to get here.”

I remember the days of not having much. When I was 17, I had a full-time job during the entire summer at a call center. One day I was cycling to work and a massive downpour started about halfway through.

If I stopped to get shelter from the rain, I would’ve been late. I also couldn’t return to get the bus. I had to keep cycling.

Man, I still remember how I felt when I showed up at work, completely SOAKED in water, from my socks to my underwear. I sat down, at 9 AM and started making my calls.

During my breaks, I went to the bathroom and tried to dry my clothes piece by piece with the electric hand dryer. That whole day I sat in my chair with wet clothes, cursing at everything in my mind.

I was livid. I didn’t want a hard life like that.

A hard life versus doing hard things

Looking back, I’m grateful for experiences like that when I was in my teens and early twenties. It taught me that a hard life can be like a black hole that you can’t get out from.

My luck was that after the summer, I went to college. My parents, who never went to college, forced me to study. I really wanted to keep working because I thought that having my own money would make my life easy.

They knew better. Having a salary and nothing else is the road to a hard life. The path to an easier life is to get educated.

• Getting educated is hard.
• Learning new skills is hard.
• Exercising regularly is hard.
• Eating healthy is hard.